Tuesday 18 September 2007

Chaos analysis? Chaos tools?

Analyzing, breaking down an object into its bits, objects that represent states of the world and these can be many, are found everywhere, anywhere you care to look, on earth, on the land we live, the neighbourhood we stay, our home, our kitchen, our bedroom. It all depends on the focus of our attention.

What are these tools? How can we proceed with such a so-called analysis? Chaos analysis?

It looks, as this has to do with the mechanisms John Holland mentions in his book of emergence. In page 130 of his book, I read about mechanisms that:

- simpler mechanisms combine to yield a more complex mechanism
- the interaction of the mechanisms generates complex, organised behaviour
- the mechanisms allowed will be few in kind and simple to describe, enforcing the deletion of many details.

Meta-thought: Would that last property of the mechanism concept can be used to clarify situations-states under study? Can it be used to analyze a certain situation, the object, a chaos analysis? Be a chaos tool?

How? By identifying the mechanisms involved in the emergence of situation- state, the object; and define them, use this definition as guide and classify the clutter that is presented in front of you, to specific and non-specific items to the object studied, the "enforcing the deletion of many details" part of the concept's property.

What do you mean? When you observe a certain situation-state, an object, drawn out of the world, you have a mixed background, Erich Harth's penumbrae, outputs of many processes that belong to other systems.
Systems boundaries overlap therefore when you isolate a part of the world for study, the elements observed belong to more than one system. You have to identify the elements that make up the mechanisms of the system under study, draw the attention towards the object and discard the elements of mechanisms that belong to other systems.

Therefore defining the mechanisms (which are few in kind and simple to describe) will "enforce the deletion of many details", specifically the inputs, outputs and mechanisms of other systems, intruding branches of other objects, the non-systemic elements. This will make sure that only the system, and therefore the object under study is considered.

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